A design and recipe resource with "all the tools to plan a productive garden before seeds ever meet the ground" ( The Wall Street Journal ). Based on seasonal cycles, each chapter of this indispensible book provides a new way to look at the planning stages of starting a garden―with themes and designs such as the Salad Lover's Garden, the Heirloom Maze Garden, the Children's Garden, and the Organic Rotation Garden. More than 100 recipes―including a full range of soups, salads, main courses, and desserts, as well as condiments and garnishes―are featured here, all using the food grown in each specific garden. “There's no reason a vegetable garden must be an eyesore, banished to the corner by the garage. . . . The Complete Kitchen Garden . . . combines design advice, garden wisdom and recipes.” ― Chicago Tribune Ellen Ecker Ogden is co-founder of The Cook's Garden seed company, now owned by the Burpee seed catalog. She is the author of From the Cook's Garden and The Vermont Cheese Book . Ellen has written articles for Country Living , Organic Gardening , EatingWell, the Boston Globe , and the Herb Companion . She lives in Manchester Village, Vermont. The Complete Kitchen Garden An Inspired Collection of Garden Designs and 100 Seasonal Recipes By Ellen Ecker Ogden, Ramsay Gourd, Ali Kaukas, Dervla Kelly Abrams Books Copyright © 2011 Ellen Ecker Ogden All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-58479-856-9 Contents From Art to the Kitchen Garden, Getting Started, Why a Kitchen Garden?, How to Get Started, Kitchen Gardens, The Salad Lover's Garden, The Organic Rotation Garden, The Cook's Garden, The Children's Garden, The Culinary Herb Garden, The Paint Box Garden, The Patio Garden, The Heirloom Maze Garden, The Garnish Garden, The Chef's Garden, The Family Garden, The Artist's Garden, The Country Garden, The Four Friends Garden, Resources, Designing a Kitchen Garden, Preserving the Bounty, A Well-stocked Pantry, Recipe Index, Plant Index, Index, Acknowledgments, CHAPTER 1 Getting Started Why a Kitchen Garden? Sowing seeds and watching food grow goes back to the first hunter-gatherers, yet the earliest documented form of orderly kitchen gardens were the ancient Persian gardens from around 1500 BCE. This type of garden, called a Paradise garden, was located within a walled enclosure at the center of a home, and formed an outdoor room for entertaining, contemplation, and listening to poetry or music. The Paradise garden sheltered a vibrant collection of fruits and flowering plants, And always included a water feature in the form of a central fountain that split the garden into four squares symbolizing the four nourishing liquids found in Paradise: milk, honey, wine, and water. Each garden plot represented the four cardinal directions: North, South, East, and West. The Paradise garden style was adopted by the Greeks and Romans, and continued to be a source of culinary as well as aesthetic enjoyment. During the Medieval era and the fall of the Roman Empire, anything that was considered sensual and pleasurable, which included beautiful gardens, was banned. Monasteries became the disseminators of the church doctrine; kitchen gardens were grown behind high walls and colonnades of tall trees, and were largely the domain of the monks and nuns. They cultivated a much simpler style of garden than was previously enjoyed, focusing on useful medicinal or culinary plants for the benefit of the community. Yet like their Persian precursors, these gardens were laid out in intricately patterned beds with espaliered pear trees, climbing vines, and vegetables planted in geometric grids. These monastery gardens served as a retreat for meditation and prayer, as well as a primary source of nourishment. In turn, many of the features of these early medieval gardens inspired the gardeners of the Renaissance era. The fanciful parterre garden — featuring clipped yew, boxwood, and herbs planted in ornate patterns — was developed, and the Baroque period took this idea even further, giving birth to the kitchen gardens At Château de Villandry, best known as France's archetypal potager . Villandry featured seemingly endless geometric parterres edged in immaculately clipped boxwood to create subdivisions for ornamental vegetables and flowers. French and Italian gardeners continued to plant kitchen gardens, and their passion for Fresh cuisine has inspired Americans to savor the glorious connection between the garden and the dining table. In this book you will find a range of kitchen garden designs that bridge the old with the new, building on the classic four-square concept, along with gardens that have contemporary appeal. A kitchen garden goes beyond the simple, straight rows of a vegetable garden to combine art and cuisine in ways that enhance the experience of growing food. How to Get Started Gardeners can always learn from other gardeners , and I'll admit that some of my best idea